Thursday, May 28, 2009

President Hugo Chavez today gave the order to nationalize various companies in the briquette sector, as well as iron companies and ceramics factories, all in the southern state of Bolivar, with the goal of ending the trade union crisis that has emerged in these organizations in the last two months.

"Briquette sector - nationalize, there is nothing to debate," declared the head of state on a national channel from Guayana City, during a labor workshop with workers from basic industries. "These companies have to be under workers' control; it has to be that way," stated the chief executive, adding that "we have been involved in this for some time and it's been some time since we should have done it."

The companies Comsigua, Iron and Steel Works Materials (Matesi), Orinoco Iron, Venprecar, and Tavsa Tubes will pass under state control possibly starting this weekend (May 23-24). The nationalization of Carabobo Ceramics was also announced, a company that has sustained a prolonged labor conflict.

The shares of Comsigua include shares of Japan's Kobe Steel, Mitsui, and Sojitz. A good part of the iron production of this region is sold to Asia, Europe, and the United States.

Another company mentioned was Venezuela's Tubes of Steel (Tavsa), subsidiary of the Argentine group Tenaris, the largest manufacturer of seamless steel tubes for the oil industry in the world, whose plant in the south of Venezuela produces some 80,000 tons of tubes and employs 250 people, according to company data.

Orinoco Iron and Venprecar are subsidiaries of IBH, a briquette unit of the iron and steelworks plant Sivensa, one of the largest Venezuelan companies that until now hadn't been affected by the wave of nationalizations, and which has around 18% of the capital valued on the Caracas Stock Exchange. Between them the two firms produce around three million tons annually of prereduced iron briquettes, which are used as a substitute for high quality scrap iron in the process of producing steel. IBH produced net losses of $20 million in its first fiscal trimester, which ended in December 2008, compared to a $12 million profit registered in the same time period the year before.

"Start the process of nationalization at once, in order to be able to create this industrial complex," affirmed Chavez, who said that implementation of this measure should have begun some time ago. The head of state asserted that this new era "has to be assumed with responsibility, with a sense of integration between the government and the workers."

In addition, he explained that in this process of nationalization there must be transparency and strategic sense. Chavez made an appeal "for responsibility, for a struggle against mafias, against corruption, bad management, and the deviations and vices of the Fourth Republic," because "they are a threat to the socialist revolution."

According to the chief executive, the mafias, bad management, and corruption, "inherited from the Fourth Republic, led us to the trade union situation in the region." In agreement with the unions, the employees of the firms that will pass under state control haven't been paid in six months, and for this reason they have been soliciting government intervention since last year to remedy the constant delays.

Chavez indicated that now "each factory will be a school, in order to produce, like Che Guevara said, not just briquettes and irons and steel and aluminum, but rather, above all, the new man and woman, the new society, the socialist society."

Chavez maintained that all the easy paths lead to failure. It's for that reason that Venezuela follows the path of resistance and enrichment of the transformations that are being carried out in the country, in order that it have independent strength. "We don't want easy paths, Venezuela has the option of resistance in order to continue breaking the old structures imposed by the national bourgeosie that lived on its knees before North American imperialism," he said.

"We must broaden our project, but with the unity of the working class which now can play a larger role," he said. "How long will we continue importing products that we can make here? We must bring to fruition the workers' projects," he insisted. Chavez called for unity and indicated that "here we must leave fighting behind," and guaranteed that the Venezuelan working class would provide an example of greatness. "You tell me the passion that you feel," he emphasized.

Monday, May 25, 2009

Flanked respectively by his Venezuelan and Bolivian counterparts, Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa today commemorated the 187th anniversary of the Battle of Pichincha, which sealed the independence of Ecuador, and declared that he will radicalize his "Citizen Revolution."

Correa also confirmed his commitment to Latin American integration and his Bolivarian political posture.

In a speech given at The Temple of the Nation, a great historical museum constructed on the side of the Pichincha Volcano, at the foot of which Quito rises up, Correa said that today Ecuadorians are celebrating "two liberating births."

The first of them, he specified, is because on the side of that mountain, on May 24, 1822, occurred the Battle of Pichincha, the military action that put an end to Spanish colonial domination of South America.

In that place the Ecuadorian head of state evoked the names of the Liberator Simon Bolivar and Marshal Antonio Jose de Sucre, who commanded the army at the heroic battle of Pichincha.

"We cannot say the word liberty without mentioning Bolivar," maintained Correa, and he reproached politicians opposed to his government, who try to discredit the historic importance of the Liberator.

The second "liberating birth," said Correa, took place last April 26 in the general elections, in which he was re-elected for a second term of four years, which, he says, indicates that the people support his "Citizen Revolution."

The people chose "this profound, rapid, and peaceful revolution," added the chief executive, who promised to "radicalize and deepen" his "Citizen Revolution," while maintaining that "the revolution is now, not tomorrow."

"We intensify the Citizen Revolution, continuing with the policy of openness with all the countries of the world, in a context of mutual respect, seeking Latin American integration, in order to continue constructing one great Latin America, about which Jose Marti spoke," observed Correa.

He highlighted the visits of Chavez and Morales to the Independence ceremony, the latter not anticipated, and paraphrased Bolivar: "The unity of our peoples is no mere chimera of men, but the inexorable decree of destiny."

In addition, the Ecuadorian leader reminded listeners that he had met with Chavez since yesterday in the Fifth Ecuador-Venezuela Presidential Meeting, in which both chief executives inspected bilateral projects and highlighted the advances registered in energy and oil matters.

Correa mentioned an agreement to exchange Ecuadorian crude oil for Venezuelan oil products, which have saved his country $252 million in two years, as well as advances in plans for constructing a petrochemical complex in the coastal province of Manabi (west).

Likewise, he pointed out the start of gas exploration in the Gulf of Guayaquil, specifically on the Island of Puna, but he criticized the fact that opponents broke into those installations yesterday while he was meeting with Chavez, in order to cast a shadow over the project.

Correa and Chavez have insisted on getting their South American partners to finance the Bank of the South and the Unified System of Regional Compensation (Sucre), as mechanisms to strengthen regional integration.

Chavez recalled that the Bank of the South and Sucre are two of the instruments that various Latin American countries have tried in order to create a common economic area.

Last night neither Correa nor Chavez let pass the opportunity to criticize capitalism and evoke the "socialism of the 21st Century" that both preach, and they insisted that the international financial crisis is the fault of neo-liberalism.

"The world is not going to be the same after this crisis," in which "the neo-liberal paradigm was pulverized," noted Chavez, although he said that he still sees the world collapse of capitalism as far off.

On the other hand, Correa repeated that his government "is and will be of the indigenous peoples," the poorest strata of Ecuadorian society, although he said that his administration will direct itself towards all social sectors, above all in favor of the most needy.

After the ceremony, Correa, Chavez, and Morales moved to the presidential palace of Carondelet and planned for the two guests to return to their countries in the next few hours.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

The U. N. conference against racism was boycotted by the USA , inventor of the most deadly and long lasting form of racism, and Israel, founded on racist dominance of one people over another. They, along with their surrogates attending under strict orders to protect Israel from any revelation about its nature , offered evidence of the fading status of western supremacy. A disgraceful performance by the west was only successful as reported to a minority of the world’s population .

While western media parroted the party line in claiming that alleged anti-Semitism in the Iranian president’s rhetoric provoked the prearranged rush for the exit by political puppets , President Ahmadinejad’s words actually echoed the sentiments of a global majority. He spoke bluntly, though only briefly, of the last racist regime on earth, but mostly he addressed the hope for global peace and challenged a political economic order that threatens humanity’s future .

The minority slouching out of the auditorium - while the majority applauded and cheered Ahmadinejad - was treated here as a shocked reaction by something called the international community. That refers to a loose global association of dependents and henchmen of the U.S. and Israel , but it represents a shrinking minority that needs military force and consciousness control to maintain its domination . It is slowly losing its power , which is good news for humanity.

Ahmadinejad’s speech addressed reality for an as yet officially unrepresented international community that relies on a few leaders from the subjugated world on which the west built much of its wealth. Only a brief mention of the Jewish apartheid state was enough to censor the rest of his talk for most westerners, while distorting the reality of the atrocious social policies he addressed. It seems nearly impossible, in the west, to speak critically of a racist state at the core of violence and misery in the middle east since its creation sixty years ago. At least to an audience which relies on the failing empire for its survival, and which will face an even more dismal future as long as it maintains that status.

Here in America, the Israel lobby had long been at work pressuring its servants to boycott the meeting, using the most hateful and often certifiably psychotic twisting of words and thoughts to further its cause. What are supposed to be representative members of our government bent to its will, as usual, lest their finances, reputations and political or professional careers be brought to an end. This coercive power exercised by agents of a foreign country over a theoretically democratic government is an outrage that is only just beginning to be confronted by the American people .

Ahmadinejad called for reorganizing the U. N. , with power moving from the western minority dominated Security Council to the global majority representing the General Assembly . This important point and the general thrust of his talk was nullified by his brief mention of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, made to seem outrageous to a mind managed western population . Alone among world leaders, he constantly speaks to the injustice of Palestinians made to suffer for European sins, and is depicted as a monstrous “uber” fiend intent on destroying the Jewish people for speaking this obvious truth. The west will soon have to face the reality he speaks of or the criminally immoral nature of its political economics will totally destroy what we call civilization.

A history of racism and present injustice in the middle east are hardly the only problems we face, given the destructive economics of capitalism. But the treatment of Palestine and its impact on the Arab world has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands in wars and uprisings , and tens of trillions of dollars as well. The Iranian president may one day be acknowledged as a herald of the future by some of the same propaganda parrots joining in his defamation now. His speech should be read by all Americans in order that they understand exactly what he said, and see that his words reflect a reality far from the fiction presented to them by their media and politicians. And it is reality being experienced by more Americans than ever before.

The present economic chaos is only the latest in a series of financial disasters which profit a few at loss to the many , but it is threatening all of humanity and not just growing numbers of Americans. Political leaders from South America to Asia to Africa are addressing the critical need for global change, while the west tries to maintain its domination under a new regime made to seem a triumph of Affirmative Action. But the American brand of A.A. maintains the economic system by benefiting some only at the expense of others; it allows a few in, but still keeps most out, just as the economics of profit and loss must have losers in order for some to win. This is the basic economic contradiction that the world must confront and overcome democratically . The imperial rule of the west has benefitted some of the world by leaving most of the world in ruins and poverty , but voices of the previously unheard are beginning to resound, even as strictly controlled western media tries to exclude and distort them.

Under the intense strains of a disastrously wasteful consumption economy that is rapidly diminishing the environment of the entire globe, new movements and governments are beginning to face the fact that a future for humanity means an end to the system of western capital’s domination. It’s time we in the west joined the majority, but we’ll have to deal with obstructions caused by our own rulers in order to do so. We need exactly what Ahmadinejad called for at Geneva; democracy. And that means, among other things, that we must end to the coercive power of corporate capital over our economy, and the Israel lobby over our foreign policy.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.

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Monday, May 11, 2009

The president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, today asked his American counterpart to stop "killing innocent people in Afghanistan" and condemned the "crimes and genocides" that, he said, the American air force is committing in that country.

In a speech given in Free San Francisco, 50 miles north of Managua, Ortega said that (the situation) pains him and he condemns the fact that "other countries are suffering bombings."

The head of state said that Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez told Obama yesterday to stop killing and massacring innocent people in other countries.

"We are completely in agreement and we join that call that President Hugo Chavez has made and, from Free San Francisco, we tell President Barack Obama to stop killing people, children, defenseless women," said Ortega.

According to the chief executive, the bombings by the American air force in Afghanistan have caused more than 100 deaths in recent days.

"There have been changes in the United States because now George W. Bush is not president, but the bombings continue as though Bush were still there and these deaths in Afghanistan now can't be charged to Bush; now there's another president of the United States, one who should do everything possible to avoid these crimes and genocides," said Ortega.

The head of state also lashed out at the European Parliament for not condemning those crimes and attacked those he called "right wing forces" for having approved a resolution condemning Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua for violations of human rights.

He pointed out that the European Parliament approved that resolution "calmly, in a policy of interference that doesn't want to break with its colonial past, and seeks to disqualify Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, as though there is no democracy in these countries."

He added that, "they approved that resolution simply because in these countries (Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela) traitors and oligarchs don't govern."

The head of state defended what he called the "resistance of the Afghan people, which has the right to struggle against being occupied and bombed."

He also attacked the International Court of Human Rights and the Organization of American States, which he called "garbage" for not condemning the United States for these crimes.

"In Nicaragua we face crises but we are at peace and we don't have the least fear that the American air force will bomb our country," said Ortega.

The head of state today inaugurated a dock in Free San Francisco, constructed with an investment of $1.5 million in order to improve transportation and encourage tourism in that town.

"I don’t want to die!"-----crying Los Angeles schoolchildren at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis

"I cut his balls off."-----President Kennedy, exulting in what he took to be Premier Khrushchev’s humiliation in backing away from nuclear war

“End this madness,” Bertrand Russell cabled John Kennedy, imploring the American president to come to his senses while the world waited to discover if Kennedy’s game of “nuclear chicken” was destined to relegate Hiroshima and Nagasaki to footnotes of the atomic age.

In order to prevent Washington from staging a second Bay of Pigs (i.e., repeat invasion of Cuba) the Soviet Union had installed nuclear missiles on the island in the fall of 1962. Though a negotiated settlement carried the least risk of catastrophe, the Kennedy administration rejected diplomacy for allegedly carrying the taint of moral weakness. At a time when nuclear-armed Soviet submarines could hit U.S. territory from the ocean, Kennedy opted to blockade Cuba, and he did so (in violation the U.N. Charter), cutting off Soviet access to the island.

Soviet supply ships with submarine escorts steamed toward the American blockade while the largest U.S. invasion force since WWII prepared for war with 42,000 nuclear-armed Soviet troops awaiting them in Cuba. The Strategic Air Command deployed its bomber fleet to pre-selected airfields throughout the United States, and nuclear bombs were loaded aboard planes on SAC bases in Britain, Spain, and Morocco. Nuclear-equipped fighter-bombers went on alert in Europe, preparing to hit assigned targets in the Soviet bloc. Polaris submarines possessed of enough firepower to destroy every major city in the USSR left Scotland to patrol the North Atlantic.

At the height of the crisis, Khrushchev broadcast a letter to Kennedy on Radio Moscow offering removal of Soviet missiles in Cuba and a non-aggression pledge to Turkey in return for a U.S. withdrawal of nuclear missiles from Turkey (Washington had apparently already issued a withdrawal order for those missiles) and a non-aggression pledge to Cuba. But Kennedy ignored the offer, pressing for unconditional victory with millions of lives in the balance.

According to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the official JFK historian of his White House years, this was “the most dangerous moment in human history.” How close did the world come to nuclear war? Participants in a 2002 conference between former Kennedy administration officials, former Soviet military officers, Cuban officials, and scholars from all three countries, concluded that nuclear war was averted only because a Soviet submarine commander countermanded an order to launch nuclear-armed torpedoes in response to U.S. destroyers firing depth charges to force Soviet submarines to the surface. “The lesson from this is that a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world,” said Thomas Blanton, director of the (private) National Security Archive.

Among the documents pored over at the 2002 conference in Havana was a declassified 1961 Defense Department memo describing a three-step plan for the “US endeavor to cause the overthrow of the Castro government.” The strategy was to carry out intensive military exercises near Cuba to provoke a defensive reaction, which would then give the U.S. a pretext with which to “destroy Castro with speed, force and determination.” Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s defense secretary and a conference participant, conceded that Cuba’s fears that they were going to be attacked by the U.S. were justified. “If I were in Cuban or Soviet shoes, I would have thought so, too.”

Exulting in the lucky outcome, Kennedy did not renounce Washington’s ongoing terrorist war against Cuba, which included chemical and biological attacks against the island and numerous attempts on the life of Fidel Castro. In fact, he had already effectively declared war on all of Latin America in order to prevent a second Cuban-style revolution in the hemisphere. Robert McNamara had announced in early 1962 that Latin American states receiving U.S. military assistance would henceforth change their mission from “hemispheric defense” to “internal security,” i.e., making war on their own peoples. Through the Agency For International Development, Latin American police were promised training in the use of gas guns, helicopters, anti-riot equipment, and torture. As the numbers of mutilated and dead mounted, the U.S. School of the Americas, where Washington’s counterinsurgency training was carried out, became known in Latin America as “the school of coups.”

Kennedy’s jingoist politics shouldn’t have surprised anyone, as they were a matter of longstanding record. Elected to Congress in 1946 as a rich war hero, JFK spent his time in the House condemning the “betrayal” of Poland at Yalta, thundering against the Truman administration’s “loss” of China, and voting for the McCarran Act (the Patriot Act of its day) which required that organizations tainted by “Communism” register with a Subversive Activities Control Board. Members of such organizations lost their right to travel, to hold government jobs, and to work in defense plants. In 1952 Kennedy was elected to the Senate, where he avoided condemning Joe McCarthy, who was a close friend of the Kennedy family (Bobby named him godfather of one of his children). According to Kennedy speech-writer Theodore Sorenson, the Massachusetts senator believed that military force was “the bulk of diplomacy and disarmament only a dream.” Preoccupied with shaking his fist at the Communist world, Kennedy paid little attention to the 1954 Brown decision ordering desegregation of the nation’s apartheid school system, dismissing school integration as “a judicial problem, not a legislative one.”

As president, Kennedy appointed shrewd technocrats - almost all from the upper class - who were clueless about social justice, but well-practiced in the exercise of power. Dean Rusk, a John Foster Dulles protege and president of the Rockefeller Foundation, became Secretary of State. C. Douglas Dillon of Wall Street’s Dillon, Read and Company was named Secretary of the Treasury. Robert McNamara, president of the Ford Motor Company, was selected to be Secretary of Defense. Other top Kennedy officials were Averell Harriman of Brown Brothers Harriman, Paul Nitze, of Dillon-Read, Roswell Gilpatrick of another Wall Street firm, John McCone, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and William C. Foster. John J. McCloy, who Kennedy appointed to be his special adviser on disarmament, had a background, according to Arthur Schlesinger, that “combined the Republican party, the Pentagon, the Ford Foundation, the Chase Manhattan Bank, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, the Brook and the Links.”

From such a cast progressive policy was hardly to be expected, and indeed, it was not forthcoming. In Southeast Asia Kennedy changed Washington’s Vietnam policy from support for state terror to outright aggression, which led to the disastrous U.S. engagement that claimed the lives of millions of Indochinese, as well as more than 50,000 U.S. soldiers. Contrary to much Camelot romanticism, Kennedy never considered any policy other than military victory. Just three weeks before his assassination, in the wake of the overthrow of the Diem regime, he remained hopeful about the prospects for an intensification of the war, telling the press that he thought there was a “new situation” in Vietnam, which would lead to, “we hope, an increased effort in the war” (emphasis added). He added that the U.S. policy should be to “intensify the struggle” so that “we can bring Americans out of there” - after U.S. forces had subjugated the country, a goal he never renounced.

The carnage involved in attempting to fulfill such an aspiration was, as might be expected, appalling. Children were burned alive with napalm. Fragmentation bombs ripped villagers to shreds. Charred bodies fertilized the fields of “free Vietnam” and bullet-riddled corpses of Buddhist demonstrators lay crumpled in the streets. When external support for state terrorism proved inadequate to the task, Kennedy sent the U.S. Air Force to bomb rural South Vietnam (October 1962), driving hundreds of thousands of peasants into “strategic hamlets,” where, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, they were “protected” from the guerrilla movement the Pentagon conceded they were voluntarily supporting. By the time of Kennedy’s death, over half the population of South Vietnam was engaged in forced labor in such “strategic hamlets,” with the Kennedy administration planning to incarcerate nearly the entire rural population of the country to prevent it from acting on its political convictions.

The human cost of U.S. policy in Vietnam was devastating. According to the Bertrand Russell war crimes commission, by 1963 the Vietnam war had already yielded 160,000 dead; 700,000 tortured and maimed; 400,000 imprisoned; 31,000 raped; 3000 disemboweled with their livers cut out while alive; 4000 people burned alive; 1000 destroyed temples; and 46 instances of villages attacked with poisonous chemicals.

Meanwhile, on the domestic front, Kennedy did little to aid the desegregation movement, which he considered a trivial affair until worldwide publicity forced him to pay attention (Arthur Schlesinger’s book on the Kennedy presidency treats the theme in the 35th of 37 chapters). While pacifist civil rights activists endured savage attacks at the hands of racist mobs in an attempt to topple Jim Crow, Kennedy dismissed them as “sons of bitches” (SNCC) who had “an investment in violence,” a harsh judgment he could never bring himself to make about the segregationist terrorists the SNCC activists were being beaten and killed by. He refused to back civil rights legislation until well into 1963. Among civil rights leaders, what the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins referred to as Kennedy’s “supercaution” evoked almost universal condemnation.

Embarrassed by the screaming headlines and distressed at the propaganda coup the Kremlin was reaping from his studied inaction in the face of horrifying brutality, Kennedy moved only belatedly and reluctantly to support the black freedom movement. While thousands were attacked and jailed throughout the South, and Medgar Evers was murdered on his front porch in Mississippi, FBI agents took notes and filed reports, but did not move to protect the lives of black people, or even properly investigate when white supremacists shot them dead. Worried about his support in Congress, Kennedy moved to shore up his Southern political base, appointing racist judges to the bench, including one in Georgia who sought to prevent “pinks, radicals and black voters” from overturning segregation, and another in Mississippi who saw no point in registering “a bunch of niggers on a voter drive.” And when the March on Washington threatened to include an indictment of federal government policy, Kennedy convinced black leaders to tone down their critical rhetoric and cancel plans for civil disobedience, provoking Malcolm X to dismiss the choreographed event as “the farce on Washington.”

In many ways Kennedy was Ronald Reagan. Although criticized for his participation in the McCarthy-led witch hunts (he was on a Senate committee that doggedly abused UAW leader Harold Christoffel for swearing he wasn’t a Communist, and also supported a bill that included concentration camps for heretics), he inspired admiration at home and abroad for his unwavering faith in American “democracy” (i.e., capitalism). Heir to a bootlegging fortune and helped into the White House by mob connections, he became president after besting Richard Nixon in televised campaign debates in which he promised to end the nation’s economic slump and pursue a more aggressive anti-Communist policy with Moscow once elected. While Nikita Khruschev radically cut back Soviet armaments and military forces - calling for reciprocal action by the U.S. - Kennedy ignored the plea in favor of a huge military build-up, warning repeatedly of the U.S.S.R.’s alleged “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy to take over the world.” He was obsessed with overthrowing the Cuban government (as Reagan later was with toppling the Nicaraguan Sandinistas), which he denounced as a Soviet proxy. To avoid the spread of the Cuban policy of nationalizing resources in order to raise the quality of life for the masses, he strongly supported military dictatorships throughout Latin America. He also supplied military advisors to Vietnam, enthusiastically backing their efforts to destroy popular organizations and terrorize the population into submission. To mobilize budgetary support for his massive increases in war spending, he warned the Congress and the public about a non-existent missile gap that supposedly favored the Soviets. On domestic policy, he advised restraint on social programs and a tax cut for business, which he argued would stimulate economic growth and lead to trickle down benefits for all Americans. (However, in the first five years of Kennedy-Johnson policy corporate profits increased 76.5%, but wages only 18 percent, demonstrating that JFK’s economic policies redistributed income from the poor to the rich.)

In short, an honest account of JFK’s legacy must include (1) an anti-Communist fanaticism that nearly blew up the world, (2) aggression in Vietnam that reached almost genocidal levels in subsequent years (3) contempt for civil liberties at crucial moments (4) equivocation in the face of K.K.K. terror (5) an invasion of the sovereign state of Cuba and years of terrorism against the island after the invasion failed (6) reverse Robin Hood economics.

The Sources:

Marion Lloyd, "Soviets Close to Using A-Bomb in 1962 Crisis," Boston Globe, October 13, 2002

Cedric Belfrage and James Aronson, "Something To Guard: The Stormy Life of the National Guardian, 1948-1967,"(Columbia, 1978)